The
sit-ins rated big enough at the beginning and at the end.
The first story, which ran in the Record on Feb. 2, carried
the byline of reporter Marvin Sykes. But after that day, the
sit-ins belonged to Spivey, and she covered them with a tenacity
and even-handedness that marked her long newspaper career.
"She didn't take one side
or the other. She was just fair, straight across the board,"
says Greensboro dentist George Simkins, who was president
of the local NAACP chapter in 1960 and one of Spivey's main
sources. "Other reporters would get our news, and it was so
slanted. It was always our fault. We were fighting for our
rights, but it was our fault. She was one of the few reporters
that we could get a fair shake from during the civil rights
movement."
From the time she learned what
a newspaper reporter did, Spivey never wanted to be anything
else. She loved the hustle, the pressure, the thrill of a
deadline story.
"I don't know if it's the
same way now, but it was always very exciting," says the 76-year-old
Spivey who lives in west Greensboro's Friendly Homes neighborhood.
When she came to the Greensboro
Record in 1951, she already had 13 years of experience as
a reporter. In 1953, her editor, Robert Register, decided
to give Spivey - one of two or three women on a staff of a
dozen - a beat that had always belonged to men: police.
"I knew damned good and well
that she'd take no back talk from the officers and wouldn't
take no for an answer if she knew something was going on,"
says Register, also retired.
Taller and bigger than the average
woman, Spivey was an imposing presence in her dark suits and
low-heeled shoes. She made it clear she could take care of
herself. Once, when a fire broke out in a new Kinney's shoe
store downtown, she got so close to the flames that she had
to be given oxygen for smoke inhalation.
"She was trying to make sure
she got the story," says Abe D. Jones Jr., another retired
Record editor. "She was a real hard-charging reporter."
Spivey dived into the emerging
civil rights stories. She covered the 1955 controversy over
whether the city should integrate its golf courses after Simkins
and others were refused admission at the Gillespie Park course.
She covered a similar case involving
the integration of city swimming pools after a black woman
was refused admission at Lindley Park.
Black leaders knew they could trust
her to get their side straight, and they talked to her frequently
about their plans. Leading up to February 1960, Spivey knew
the sit-ins were probably going to happen, but she thought
students in Durham would start them.
She was surprised when Ralph Johns,
a white merchant who helped the students organize, called
her at home on the afternoon of Feb. 1 to say that four N.C.
A&T students were coming downtown to take seats at Woolworth's.
It was about 4:30 p.m., and Spivey
had just gotten home from a long day at the Record. As an
afternoon newspaper, the Record required reporters to be in
the office at 7:30 a.m. so they could make noon deadlines.
The competitor, the morning Greensboro Daily News, had reporters
working afternoon and evening hours
Off-hours or not, Spivey knew she
had to check it out. She called her editor, took her young
daughter, Jan, to a neighbor, jumped into her blue Chevy and
rushed downtown. When she got to Woolworth's, she found the
doors were locked and the lights were turned down. She stood
across the street from the store, in the doorway of Prago-Guyes
women's store, where she could see both the Elm Street and
Sycamore Street sides of the store.
Minutes later, she saw the four
freshman round the corner from Sycamore onto Elm.
Despite her hard-charging reputation,
Spivey did not try to talk to the students for a story the
next day. "I guess I thought if I stirred it up too much,
the morning paper would find out about it. I could find out
everything I needed to know the next day."
But the next morning, Spivey's
bosses assigned Sykes to follow the story.
She says it doesn't bother her
that most of her stories didn't get bylines: "I wrote for
the love of being a reporter."
Neither does the display of the
stories bother her. Most ran on the front of the second section,
below the main story for the day.
That's where most local news went,
Spivey says, and at the time the sit-ins were a local story.
Plus, her stories were rather short and written in a straight,
no-frills style - not the kind of story that usually qualified
for a byline.
While sympathetic to the students'
cause, Spivey says she tried not to let her stories reflect
her personal feelings: "If you're a reporter and you get involved,
you're not a reporter."
But some people didn't want the
story reported. That spring and summer, Spivey and her family
received threatening phone calls. For a while, a car cruised
in front of their home at night, sometimes pulling into the
driveway and shining its headlights through the living room
window.
"I was sort of afraid they
might throw something through the window because the superintendent
of education, when the schools were integrated, they threw
a bottle through his picture window and burned a cross on
his front yard."
Spivey asked for, and got, police
to check her house periodically. She has nothing but praise
for the way Greensboro police handled the sit-ins and her
situation. The protest in Greensboro never turned violent,
and Spivey believes it was because of the Greensboro officers'
determination to keep the peace. |
